Two types of conversational narratives are examined in a corpus of interviews with Salvadoran immigrants who live in Washington, D.C. On the one hand, narrative sequences of counterfactual or hypothetical events position the virtual as opposed to or in comparison with the actual and, in doing so, they convey the narrator's commentary and perspective. On the other hand, narrative sequences of repeated or habitual events create the effect of a static, self-contained picture of the past and can be used to present experience as generalized and common. Both types of sequences are characterized as resources for argumentation. It is shown how recourse to irreality takes place to back a claim and how looking at the past from the past makes the storyteller's perspective relatively immune to challenge. The sociohistorical conditions of the events recounted in the data provide the basis for the view of the immigration and integration experiences presented in this paper. (Discourse Analysis, Linguistic Anthropology)
Argumentation is examined in its intersection with narrative in natural, situated, oral discourse in two-party interactions. This study examines the arguments of members of a minority group who are targets of prejudice by other minority groups. In the everyday practice of arguing in and through storytelling, speakers contextualize and rationalize conflicts, including conflicts in intergroup relations. The focus is on operations that establish relations between propositions: consequence, explanation, and analogy. The formal elaborations that take place in face-to-face storytelling include the intense exploitation of negation, parallelism and reported discourse, and reinforce the argumentative position being defended. The interviewees' motivation to make their discourse reasonable and persuasive was to transform negative socially shared opinions that eventually justify unfair treatment of their group.
occurs. Manifestation of envy is not socially acceptable. It follows from such cases that if analysts stick only to what is manifested publicly in an interaction, they miss a relevant part of social reality.The method of systematic self-observation makes it possible for the discourse analyst to approach also the phenomena (or various aspects of the phenomena) which, however obviously linked with discourse (being a discourse themselves), often remain unnoted by analysts for various reasons, e.g. particularly for their limited accessibility. In the reviewed publication such phenomena are represented by 'telling lies'. In this case, systematic self-observation confirmed what had already been suggested by the classics of conversation analysis: lying in everyday life is not so much a matter of moral qualities of the individual (their failure) but rather a question of the normatively expected course of social interaction oriented towards supporting solidarity between the participants; technically speaking (see e.g. Heritage, 1984), in many cases lying results from the speaker providing the 'preferred' reactions to the first members of 'adjacency pairs', such as an invitation, offer, request.The publication under review is certain to find its readers among specialists interested in a number of phenomena of mental and social life, whether they are professionally anchored in sociology (the field of both authors), psychology, functional linguistics, or elsewhere. Those interested in discourse may be guided by the publication to a remarkable analytical dimension of certain discourse phenomena. Discourse analysts should expect to have their field of study complicated -in the best sense of the word -by this publication.
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